The Life We Will Not, But Must, Live: part one

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The world is a very complicated place: from quantum mechanics to auto mechanics and political correctness to living correctness; it is easy to get tangled up in the cacophony of the many unconnected events that impinge on us daily.  But, there is still the interplay of the immediate present and the consequential future within which our lives and the lives of all future generations, of both humans and the rest of the living earth, will take place.  It is that ‘consequential future’ that we have relegated to the most narrow considerations possible – because it is convenient to do so and because a comprehensive view is hard.

Here is an almost cartoonish comparison that illustrates: the ‘seventh generation’ ethics of many materially simple people and the ‘quarterly report’ ethics of people gathered into what are presently called ‘corporations’ (we use the term corporation as though we actually understand what it is and its functioning in our social/economic/political world).  Even making sense of the quarter year is too long a time scale in the current Trumpian political space; we are routinely overwhelmed daily, even hourly, with deeply significant possible actions from this administration; actions that seem to be driven by the immediate and the personal and even the pathological; actions that in ‘seventh generation’ thinking would be considered wildly ludicrous, if not insane.

The questions of how best to live a human life, one that fulfills the evolved nature of the human animal are laughably irrelevant in ‘quarterly report’ ethics.  Ways of living that adapt both the species’ existence and individual members’ lives into the immediate ecosystem and the biophysical space as a whole… and that recognize the specialized and powerful newly evolved adaptations that humans bring to the world… are completely removed from consideration.

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Humans are the first animal to evolve on the earth that have belief as an important organizing principle (I entertain the possibility that other members of the genus, Homo, might also have adapted belief, but ours is the only species that has fully expressed belief outside of the dominant control of the ecosystem).  Belief is special in that it is inherently unlimited by biophysical reality; all other species have their physical form and behavior structured within and tested unceasingly by biophysical limits.  Our species also existed for many tens of thousands of years using the adaptation of belief as a powerful tool within the guardrails of the biophysical, but belief (and its primary supporting adaptations) escaped these limitations – by imagining and believing that we could [1].

We developed what I am calling the Consciousness System of Order (CSO), within which imagining is a basic function.  Belief, a sense of will (free or otherwise), a specialized awareness, language (its powers of information transmission and storage), art and ornament (again information transmission and storage), technologies (a form of solidified imaginings) and the various forms of human organization are all part of the CSO.

Of course, the CSO is not a stand-alone function, but is completely interpenetrating with motivation, emotion, cognition, learning and any other behavioral forms that might be definable; the CSO is an information handling and organizing system formed of the many cognitive behaviors (and the physical structures that supply them) found in other animals, but not organized into an integrated system as in humans [2].  The result is a completely new and internally sustaining way of organizing information: selecting, storing and implementing information in ways never before occurring in the known universe.

The CSO construct is not the thrust of this essay, however, only a necessary element in understanding how it is that humans have gone “right” and how we have gone “wrong” in our relationship with the biosphere – the final frontier, as it were, for our adjustment to living on the earth.  Our consistent, successfully maladaptive, approach to living in defined ecosystems is now confronting how our ways of living function in the total ecosystem, the biosphere, and, with that confrontation, all the rules – the things we have come to believe in – have changed; the biophysical reality is reasserting itself on the human animal with the absolutism that has controlled life on the earth for 4 billion years.

Our imagination allowed us to conceive of a sharpened stone tied to the end of a stick; imagination also allowed us to believe that we owned the plants and animals that could be collected with that stone-on-stick. And the imagination of and belief in owning made all things possible, more than possible: right and necessary.  The stone-on-stick and the hundreds and, then, thousands of variations created powers of control over, and the power to change, the immediate environment; human numbers went from thousands to millions and the domination of the land went from a few hectares for a hunting and gathering village to thousands and millions of hectares for agriculture, mining, travel ways, and habitations; the structures of ecosystems changed as we removed competing plants and animals – as we changed both the chemistry and the shape of the land itself.

It was once realized (imagined in close comportment with biophysical reality) that everything taken from the environment required compensation – not understood as an ecologist might and not as thoroughly implemented as a fully integrated member of an ecosystem would do.  Though this understanding was trivialized over the many years into sacrifice rituals, there remained a seed of truth: one must give to receive. However, the imbalance of ‘give and take’ became more common: years of salinization, over grazing, over hunting compensated by a basket of grain, a goat or, if really serious, a human child.  Again, imagining and belief; if the child is valuable to us, then it must be valuable to the earth. 

These are the ways that we have gone astray: With the voices of imagination and belief guiding behavior, the daily whispers of the environment are overpowered; the consequences of not listening were put off by the stone-on-stick and its increasingly many variants.  And if conditions became too difficult the people could move to another place less reduced in fecundity.   We have evidence of this process from 30,000 years ago and it began in earnest in various places 10,000 years ago. 

Each new generation believed that it didn’t apply to them, and so, has been continuous and unattended until that old recognition is forced upon us by the ultimate power of the environment: the failure to continue to supply “free services”: fertile soils, fresh water, unpolluted air, waste recycling, predictable climates and the host of intangibles that invigorate life.

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There are several facts that must be stated, believed and acted on if there is to be continued existence of the present ecological structures and a majority of the present plants and animals (a large number of species of both plants and animals have either already become extinct or are in such perilous condition that their end is almost certain).  I intend some relevance to the order of presentation, but am not wedded to it.

1) Wealth and power inequities must be challenged relentlessly. The beliefs around wealth superiority must be vanquished and the present inequalities seen as the theft that they are.  The distortions of society and the pathologies created in human beings by such accumulations need to be made an open part of our discourse.

2) There must be an immediate reduction in the activities that produce global consequences on the biosphere. This includes the production of carbon dioxide, methane, biocides, many fertilizers and more.  Also, the release and over use of antibiotics, the massive production of meat animals and actions that increase the distribution of disease vectors for both humans and other species.

3) The gathering and destruction of “wild” animals and plants must be forcefully regulated or stopped completely for some species. Over fishing, whaling, sport hunting, exotic pets and plants are all unnecessary and endanger the survival of individual species and ecosystems.

4) Some meaningful controls and limitations on the actual possibility of using nuclear, chemical and biological weapons need to be structured in both political terms and in technical solutions.

5) Moral and ethical beliefs need to be structured that allow for and guide the reduction of world human populations toward 2 billion or less over the next hundred years. I list this last knowing that many might think it primary, but last  because, without the others, this would be an entirely useless exercise.

Reading through this list a thoughtful person will almost certainly agree with the need in all or most cases, but also realize the ‘impossibility’ of making these changes. I think it true that no direct assault on the present economic, social and political system can accomplish even a tiny percentage of the need; only the failure of the environment to supply the “free services” upon which life depends can force these changes directly – that would be, of course, an irony: most of the living world would have to die for the world to be saved (the other possible option is all too obvious: authoritarian domination and the murder of billions).  There is, however, another way; a way of great uncertainty, but the only way that has even a small possibility of successfully accomplishing this list while maintaining a shred of what we call humanity.

I wrote above: “…(when) the voices of imagination and belief (are) guiding behavior, the daily whispers of the environment are overpowered; the consequences of not listening were put off by the stone-on-stick and its increasingly many variants.”

Upton Sinclair said that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” I broaden, simplify and remove some of the distortion of economic context by suggesting that ‘we become what we consistently put our hand to.’ And I mean actually put our ‘hand to’, only putting the ‘mind to’ is not the same thing.  We all put our hand to something, and if that something is ‘nothing’, then that is what we become (I know that this is not very generous, but bear with me).

What are we to put our hand to?  If you turn a tap and water flows forth at 50 PSI ‘forever’ without you making the slightest effort to make it continue, then you have put your hand to turning a tap, not to getting an essential life sustaining substance. If you work a pump handle pulling water from the ground, water flows when you move your arm and stops when you stop; if you carry that water to where it is to be used, feel its weight, avoid spilling and wasting because the measured work of your body is there in every liter…then you have an ecological relationship with water.

If you walk a mile, you have absorbed the mile into your body; but, not so if you are carried. If you collect or grow your food, if you dispose of and compost your own waste, if you design how to stay warm when cold and cool with hot and dry when wet, if you learn to live watchfully with the dangers around you without demanding their destruction or removal, if you discover ways to compensate the biophysical space for what you take from it (first realizing what you do, in fact, take from it), then you will have put your hand to living in the world as an associate, as a partner with the rest of life.

Well…this is certainly too much to ask! Everyone can’t possibly do these things, and in many cases there would be laws preventing such a way of life.  And so the dilemma: What must be done is too much to ask.  In such a case it is time for imagination and belief to be devoted to the need, the need to do what cannot be done: this is the province of the imagination. The list of “the impossible” that human imagination has made possible is the story of the CSO’s construction of new probability structures for the possible.

[1] Belief is the ‘mental’ hormone. In general somatic physiology, hormones set the processes to some organized outcome, guiding the functioning of both biological and perceptual events. These patterns originate by evolutionary processes and are, therefore, adapted to species’ roles in ecosystems.  Belief plays a similar role by also organizing biological and perceptual events into coherent behaviors of not only individuals, but groups of individuals; and not just in the moment, but over time and space.  There are, however, no biophysical limits as to what can be believed, and no natural forces of order holding belief to comport with biophysical reality.

[2] The CSO’s relationship to the LSO (the living order) and the PSO (the physical order) is weakly analogous to LSO’s relationship to the PSO. The LSO is a completely new way of organizing and handling information that is completely interpenetrating with the “Laws of Nature”; there is nothing in any action that is new, only the way the actions have become organized.